The form-data npm package facilitates the creation of multipart/form-data streams, enabling developers to easily submit forms and upload files to web applications. Examining versions 0.0.7 and 0.0.6 reveals subtle yet important distinctions for developers choosing between them. Both share the same core functionality, description, repository details and author information, indicating a consistent commitment to providing a reliable solution for form and file submissions. They both depend on mime, async, far, fake, request and formidable.
The primary difference lies in their dependencies and release dates. Version 0.0.7, released February 10, 2013, features combined-stream version "~0.0.4" while version 0.0.6, released January 8, 2013, uses combined-stream version "0.0.3". This suggests a minor update in how the combined-stream dependency is managed in the newer version. While combined-stream is important for handling streams of data, there where no explicit breaking changes between those versions.
Developers should opt for version 0.0.7 for the most up-to-date and potentially more stable handling of combined streams. If needing a package published closest to January 8, then version 0.0.6 can be used. Both versions offer a solid foundation for developers needing to construct multipart/form-data requests within their Node.js applications.
All the vulnerabilities related to the version 0.0.7 of the package
form-data uses unsafe random function in form-data for choosing boundary
form-data uses Math.random()
to select a boundary value for multipart form-encoded data. This can lead to a security issue if an attacker:
Because the values of Math.random() are pseudo-random and predictable (see: https://blog.securityevaluators.com/hacking-the-javascript-lottery-80cc437e3b7f), an attacker who can observe a few sequential values can determine the state of the PRNG and predict future values, includes those used to generate form-data's boundary value. The allows the attacker to craft a value that contains a boundary value, allowing them to inject additional parameters into the request.
This is largely the same vulnerability as was recently found in undici
by parrot409
-- I'm not affiliated with that researcher but want to give credit where credit is due! My PoC is largely based on their work.
The culprit is this line here: https://github.com/form-data/form-data/blob/426ba9ac440f95d1998dac9a5cd8d738043b048f/lib/form_data.js#L347
An attacker who is able to predict the output of Math.random() can predict this boundary value, and craft a payload that contains the boundary value, followed by another, fully attacker-controlled field. This is roughly equivalent to any sort of improper escaping vulnerability, with the caveat that the attacker must find a way to observe other Math.random() values generated by the application to solve for the state of the PRNG. However, Math.random() is used in all sorts of places that might be visible to an attacker (including by form-data itself, if the attacker can arrange for the vulnerable application to make a request to an attacker-controlled server using form-data, such as a user-controlled webhook -- the attacker could observe the boundary values from those requests to observe the Math.random() outputs). A common example would be a x-request-id
header added by the server. These sorts of headers are often used for distributed tracing, to correlate errors across the frontend and backend. Math.random()
is a fine place to get these sorts of IDs (in fact, opentelemetry uses Math.random for this purpose)
PoC here: https://github.com/benweissmann/CVE-2025-7783-poc
Instructions are in that repo. It's based on the PoC from https://hackerone.com/reports/2913312 but simplified somewhat; the vulnerable application has a more direct side-channel from which to observe Math.random() values (a separate endpoint that happens to include a randomly-generated request ID).
For an application to be vulnerable, it must:
form-data
to send data including user-controlled data to some other system. The attacker must be able to do something malicious by adding extra parameters (that were not intended to be user-controlled) to this request. Depending on the target system's handling of repeated parameters, the attacker might be able to overwrite values in addition to appending values (some multipart form handlers deal with repeats by overwriting values instead of representing them as an array)If an application is vulnerable, this allows an attacker to make arbitrary requests to internal systems.
mime Regular Expression Denial of Service when MIME lookup performed on untrusted user input
Affected versions of mime
are vulnerable to regular expression denial of service when a mime lookup is performed on untrusted user input.
Update to version 2.0.3 or later.